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TKINIDAD : THEN AND NOW. 



The telephone is of more recent date, but when it 

 once began to obtain favour elsewhere Trinidad 

 would not be behind hand and at once had it estab- 

 lished here ; it dates back to the early eighties. 



It was at first confined to Port-of-Spain but later 

 extended to San Fernando, and, later still, to other 

 country districts. With regard to the introduction 

 of the telephone, or rather after its introduction and 

 completion, a good story, for the truth of which I 

 can vouch, can be told. Although, strictly speaking 

 it has nothing to do with the Trinidad telephone, it 

 has a good deal to do with the gentleman, a Mr. Gray, 

 who superintended its erection. A Mr. Fitzgerald 

 got a kind of concession and formed a company to 

 erect a telephone system in Port-of-Spain ; its erec- 

 tion was entrusted to a Mr. Gray, an Englishman, 

 who, when he had finished here, went elsewhere to 

 erect others. It seemed that in the course of his 

 travels, he found himself in one of the South Ameri- 

 can Republics and there obtained the promise of a 

 concession giving him the sole right to erect a tele- 

 phone system there. "While on his way to England, to 

 float a company, he touched at Barbados, awaiting the 

 Eoyal Mail steamer homeward bound. Here I leave 

 him for the present, in order to introduce a man, who, 

 afterwards assumed the role of principal actor in the 

 comedy which follows. 



There was in the land of Trinidad a man whose 

 name was — but, there, no matter what his name was, 

 we will call him the man without a name. At the 

 time of the opening of the comedy, in which he played 



